Listening to God

Psalm 27:7-8, "Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice!  Have mercy also upon me, and answer me.  When You said, "Seek my face," My heart said to You, "Your face, Lord, I will seek." (NKJV)

It is very easy to expect God to listen to us when we cry out in prayer to Him.  As a matter of fact we have the potential to feel disappointed if we believe that God is not listening to our prayers.  I am of the belief that God always listen to our prayers but there are times that His answers are different than the ones that we desire.  It is during those times that we must accept the sovereignty of God and understand that God is in charge of all of the decisions regarding life.  I have written earlier this week concerning the confidence that we can place in God as we present ourselves in worship and intercession to Him.  I am thankful for all of those times that God has responded to the cries of my heart and ministered to me in my time of need.

But there is another principle found in this passage of scripture that is often overlooked or even ignored.  It is the call from God to mankind.  God calls us to "seek His face."  The way we respond to that call from God can be the difference between success and failure.  As I stated yesterday there are many ways that our culture defines success.  But how God defines success is an important spiritual principle that we can no longer afford to ignore.  We must learn to view success from the perspective of God.  We must rededicate ourselves to pleasing God.  We understand the principle of pleasing ourselves.  Many of the decisions that we make in life revolve around our desire to please ourselves.  We desire for life to satisfy our wishes and wants but the plan of God includes the need for our lives to please God.  Pleasing God (the Heavenly Father) was one of the characteristics that we can identify in the life of Christ.  Even in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus prayed for the will of God to be accomplished in His life. 

What are we doing with the voice of God when He speaks to us?  How do we respond to His call to "seek His face?"  How often do we ignore the call to prayer because it is inconvenient at that moment or we are too embarrassed to make the appropriate response?  How does God feel when we desire for Him to hear our voice but we develop selective hearing when we hear His voice?  Communicating with God must once again become a high priority among believers.  I believe that it is pleasing to God when we have a strong desire to communicate with God and respond in obedience to His call to each of us individually.  Let us add hearing the voice to God to our measurements of success!